6.5.10

ΣΑΝ ΣΗΜΕΡΑ. ΟΛΓΑ ΜΠΡΟΥΜΑ

Olga Broumas (born 6 May 1949, Hermoupolis), is a Greek poet, resident in the United States.
Born and raised in Greece, Broumas secured a fellowship through the Fulbright program to study in the United States at the University of Pennsylvania; she earned her Bachelor's degree in architecture. She later went on to earn a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of Oregon.
Her first collection of poems, Beginning with O, contains erotic poems toward her women lovers. Broumas was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1977, the first non-native speaker of English to receive this award. Other honors have included a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been Poet-in-Residence and Director of Creative Writing at Brandeis University since 1995. She spends her summers on Cape Cod, where she, in the Eighties, founded and taught at a school for female artists called Freehand, Inc. (en.wikipedia.org)


Cinderella

............. ... the joy that isn't shared
.............I heard, dies young.
.............--Anne Sexton, 1928-1974


Apart from my sisters, estranged
from my mother, I am a woman alone
in a house of men
who secretly
call themselves princes, alone
with me usually, under cover of dark. I am the one allowed in

to the royal chambers, whose small foot conveniently
fills the slipper of glass. The woman writer, the lady
umpire, the madam chairman, anyone's wife.
I know what I know.
And I once was glad

of the chance to use it, even alone
in a strange castle doing overtime on my own, cracking
the royal code. The princes spoke
in their father's language, were eager to praise me
my nimble tongue. I am a woman in a state of siege, alone

as one piece of laundry, strung on a windy clothesline a
mile long. A woman co-opted by promises: the lure
of a job, the ruse of a choice, a woman forced
to bear witness, falsely
against my own kind, as each
other sister was judge inadequate, bitchy, incompetent,
jealous, too thin, too fat. I know what I know.
What sweet bread I make

for myself in this prosperous house
is dirty, what good soup I boil turns
in my mouth to mud. Give
me my ashes. A cold stove, a cinder-block pillow, wet
canvas shoes in my sisters', my sisters' hut. Or I swear

I'll die young
like those favored before me, hand-picked each one
For her joyful heart.

6 σχόλια:

erva_cidreira είπε...

Leda and Her Swan





You have red toenails, chestnut

hair on your calves, oh let

me love you, the fathers

are lingering in the background

nodding assent.



I dream of you

shedding calico from

slow-motion breasts, I dream

of you leaving with

skinny women, I dream you know.



The fathers are nodding like

overdosed lechers, the fathers approve

with authority: Persian emperors, ordering

that the sun shall rise

every dawn, set

each dusk, I dream.



White bathroom surfaces

rounded basins you

stand among

loosening

hair, arms, my senses.



The fathers are Dresden figurines

vestigial, anecdotal

small sculptures shaped

by the hands of nuns. Yours

crimson tipped, take not part in that

crude abnegation, Scarlet

liturgies shake our room, amaryllis blooms

in your upper thighs, water lilly

on mine, fervent delta



the bed afloat, sheer

linen blowing

on the wind: Nile, Amazon, Mississippi.

erva_cidreira είπε...

Circe



The Charm





The fire bites, the fire bites. Bites

to the little death. Bites



till she comes to nothing. Bites

on her own sweet tongue. She goes on. Biting.





The Anticipation





They tell me a woman waits, motionless

till she’s wooed. I wait



spiderlike, effortless as they weave

even my web for me, tying the cord in knots



with their courting hands. Such power

over them. And the spell



their own. Who could release them? Who

would untie the cord



with a cloven hoof?





The Bite





What I wear in the morning pleases

me: green shirt, skirt of wine. I am wrapped



in myself as the smell of night

wraps round my sleep when I sleep



outside. By the time

I get to the corner



bar, corner store, corner construction

site, I become divine. I turn



men into swine. Leave

them behind me whistling, grunting, wild.

erva_cidreira είπε...

Maenad

Hell has no fury like women's fury. Scorned
in their life by the living
sons they themselves
have set loose, like a great gasp
through a fleshy nostril.
Hell has no fury.

Hell has no fury like fury of women. Scorned
by their daughters who claim paternity, wed-
lock, deliverance
from the pulsing apron-strings of the apron
tied round their omphalos, that maternal
and terrible brand. Hell has no fury.

Hell has no fury like the fury of women. Scorned
from birth by their mothers who
must deliver the heritage: signs, methods,
artifacts, what-they-remember
intact to them, and who have no time
for sentiment, only warnings. Hell has no fury.

And hell has no fury like fury of women. Scorning
themselves in each other's image
they would deny that image
even to god
as she laughs at them, scornfully
through her cloven maw. Hell has no rage like this

women's rage.

erva_cidreira είπε...

Body and Soul





There is a joke it goes in Greece

that summer there was a futbol

match and the husband had

lost his lady. BITCH he shouted

after her WHORE WOMAN HEY YOU

BITCH. Greece is civilized

the cop said call your wife

by name. I can’t the man

said. Call her name

the cop said. Not allowed

the man said. Call her name I said the cop

said if you don’t the man said in the Greek futbol

stadium he said

ELEUTHERIAAAAAAAAA

erva_cidreira είπε...

Eye of Heart



Because I was whipped as a child

frequently by a mother so bewildered

by her passion

her generous hunger she would freak

as the swell of her

even her love for me

alone in the small house

of our room by the Metropolis and fling me

the frantic flap of her hand as if some power

in me to say I want brought the unbearable

also to the lips



and as it didn’t hurt

nearly as much as her distress

imagined it and set the set I grew up longing

for consummation as she did

beyond endurance

tenderness acceptance of the large

insatiable that grows so small

and grateful if allowed

its portion of sun



so that the images that led me down

the spiral of forgetting self and listing

like a phenomenon in the grip of its weather

dazzling or threatening but free

of civilization were the links

whereby her terror

made good its promise to annihilate

my will her will I couldn’t tell

the difference then as now

when making love I can

breathe in forever on that rise

indefinite plateau whose briefness

like an eye in unself-conscious and the sphere

of the horizon its known line.

erva_cidreira είπε...

She Loves



deep prolonged entry with the strong pink cock

the sit-ups is evokes from her, arms fast

on the climbing invisible rope to the sky,

clasping and unclasping the cosmic lorus *



Inside, the long breaths of lung and cunt

swell the vocal cords and a rasp a song

loud sudden overdrive into disintegrate,

spinal melt, video hologram in the belly.



Her tits are luminous and sway to the rhythm

and I grab them and exaggerate their orbs.

Shoulders above like loaves of heaven,

nutmeg-flecked, exuding light like violet diodes



closing circuit where the wall, its fuse box,

so stolidly stood. No room for fantasy.

We watch ourselves transform the past

with such disinterested fascination,



the only attitude that does not stall

the song by an outburst of consciousness

and still lets consciousness, loved and incurable

voyeur, peek in. I tap. I slap. I knee, thump, bellyroll.



Her song is hoarse and is taking me,

incoherent familiar path to that self we are wall

cortical cells of. Every o in her body

beelines for her throat, locked on



a rising ski-lift up the mountain, no

grass, no mountaintop, no snow.

White belly folding, muscular as milk.

Pas de deux, pas de chat, spotlight



on the key of G, clef du roman, tour de force letting,

like the sunlight lets a sleeve worn against wind, go.